Colleges are harder to get into than ever, and the competition for admission at most universities is growing each year, right? Not according to recent reports.
While many Americans believe that college admission rates have drastically dropped, data released last week from the National Association for College Admission Counseling shows that the acceptance rate at four-year colleges only declined from 71.3 percent in 2001 to 66.8 percent in 2007.
Stanford economist Caroline M. Hoxby found that this misconception exists because a small number of colleges have become significantly more competitive in recent decades while about half of American universities have actually become much less competitive.
“Students used to attend a local college, regardless of their abilities and its characteristics,” Hoxby wrote in her report. “Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college’s resources and student body.”
Hoxby found that this has caused some of the most elite universities to receive many more applications than in the past, while smaller, regional four-year colleges have seen significant drops.
“While a large percentage of our applicants used to come from Southern California, we’re now seeing more and more applications from around the world,” said UCLA admissions spokeswoman Elizabeth Kivowitz Boatright-Simon.
Boatright-Simon said that this trend declined slightly last year due to the economy and rising costs of out-of-state tuition.
“I’m interested in doing international business, and I’ve seen a lot of research that shows the University of South Carolina is the best,” said Coppell High School senior Kevin Rutledge. “It’s not going to matter where I attend college, but if that’s the best school for my major, then that’s where I’ll go.”
The downturn in the economy has also had a direct effect on college admissions. According to the 2009 State of College Admission report released last week from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, colleges are admitting more students, expanding wait lists and increasing grant sizes to help recoup large losses in their endowments during the financial crisis.
Hoxby’s research, which was recently published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, states that the number of high school graduates has increased by 131 percent from 50 years ago, while the number of college freshman has increased by 297 percent.
This data demonstrates that more and more colleges are accepting high school students today who may not have been admitted in previous years.
“The reason that initially selective colleges are much more selective today is not that they have failed to expand to absorb greater numbers of extremely high aptitude students,” Hoxby wrote. “In fact, they have expanded modestly, keeping up with the modest growth in the population of such students.”
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